Justice at Risk (20 page)

He stepped around in front of me, planted his feet, and put his left hand firmly on my chest.

“But you’re a tough guy, aren’t you, Justice? You don’t get scared, do you?”

“Maybe I just don’t have as much to lose.”

“Maybe you don’t know it until it happens.”

“I think we had this little talk already, Sergeant. The other night, when you followed me around like bad credit.”

His voice softened a little, became sly.

“Speaking of financial matters, you aren’t exactly living on easy street.”

“That’s not too hard to figure out.”

“I could probably arrange it so you didn’t have to be the loser in all this—fix it so you came out of it with something for yourself.”

“If I lower my ears, you mean, and slink away with my tail between my legs.”

“You could wake up Monday morning, Justice, with a pretty comfortable stake. Instead of wondering how you’re going to pay your rent next month.”

“Funny, Jacob Kosterman offered me the same kind of deal.”

“And what did you tell him?”

“I thought real hard about it, found it more than a little tempting.”

“No one could blame you for that.”

“Then I got sick to my stomach. Kind of the way I’m feeling now.”

“If you keep pushing, you’re going to end up feeling a whole lot worse.”

“Is that another threat, Sergeant?”

“I’m afraid it’s a promise.”

A distant roar went up from the gallery inside the park, followed by sustained applause.

“You’d better get back to the course, Montego, to do some backslapping. That could be Fairchild, scoring a hole in one.”

He smiled grimly.

“Somehow, I doubt it.”

He started to go, but stopped, and looked at me frankly. “I told you once before that I don’t like to see people get hurt. Whether you want to believe it or not, it’s the truth.” He sounded sincere, almost sad. “But there’s not a lot more I can do to help you, if you’re bent on putting your ass in the grinder.”

“Like I said, Sergeant, I just want a few answers.”

He gazed at me a long moment with funereal eyes. Then he turned and ambled away, back toward the polite applause of the crowd.

Out on the street, a long, sleek car passed. It was black and old, in vintage condition, possibly a Bentley. The driver was a clean-cut young man of nondescript Asian features in a chauffeur’s cap and coat. In the back seat, an older woman sat peering out the open window from behind dark glasses, her chin held high like royalty. She was wearing an elegant red pantsuit, and was close enough to where I stood that I could see the age lines in her face and neck.

I saw her lips move but heard no words as she spoke in a near whisper to the driver. The window slowly raised, until I was looking at my own reflection in the darkened glass, knowing that Rose Fairchild was on the other side, watching me.

When I arrived back on Norma Place with a bag of groceries, I found a hand-delivered package from New Image Productions on the porch, leaning against the door. The day’s mail had also been delivered, and among the bills was an oversized postcard from Germany, with a note penned by Maurice:

My dearest Benjamin,

Our journey down the Rhine was absolutely divine. Fred and I sipped soft white wine and munched grapes and the most wonderful little cheeses, and I read from a guidebook about each of the historical castles on the hilltops as we passed, while Fred shot photographs when he wasn’t stealing glances at the ruddy-faced German boys. There was a small orchestra playing on board, and when Fred was tipsy enough, I got him to waltz with me, right there in front of everyone—even the blue-haired ladies! (I mean, at our age, who cares what anyone thinks?) Before long, wouldn’t you know it, just about everyone on board had gotten up for a dance or two, and it was just like one big, happy family! (One of the blue-haired ladies even asked me to dance, and I can assure you, I showed her a new step or two.) We’re off to Paris now, with no set itinerary between here and there except to follow our hearts, and fall in love with each other all over again, the way we first did back in the fifties. Please remember to keep the kitty litter clean, as Fred and Ginger are both quite fastidious in that regard, and be sure to walk the doggie, whom Fred (my Fred) misses terribly. I hope you’re enjoying the house, and have found someone to warm the bed with you. See you sometime in the late spring, dear one.

Kisses, kisses, kisses, Maurice

I set the mail on the kitchen counter and cleaned the litter box before I forgot, then opened the package that had been delivered by messenger. It contained the finished video Cecile Chang had promised me; I tossed it on the bed in the small bedroom at the end of the hall, where Maurice and Fred kept their VCR. After feeding and walking Maggie, I took my notebook and a glass of cold lemonade out to the quiet of the backyard. At the top of the stairs, Peter’s door was shut, and the curtains were drawn. I hadn’t seen him since last night, when Oree had caught us kissing and driven off in a rush, leaving Peter confused and me retreating into solitude for a while. At some point, we’d have to talk it out, but now wasn’t the time.

I eased myself into a lawn chair, opened my notebook, and printed a list of all the players in the Callahan-Mittelman murder scenario, hoping it might bring some clarity to a blurry picture.

Cecile Chang

Tommy Callahan

Byron Mittelman

Melissa Zeigler

Jacob Kosterman

Winston Tsao-Ping

Pearl Tsao-Ping

Franklin (and Lu-Ling) Tsao-Ping

Charlie Gitt

Assistant Chief Taylor Fairchild

Rose Fairchild

Sergeant Felix Montego

I studied the names awhile, then jotted two more at the bottom: Oree Joffrien and Peter Graff. After each of these, I added a question mark to indicate how peripheral they seemed, which was ironic, since they had recently become the two most compelling men in my life. The difference now was that Peter was still here while Oree was gone, and it seemed probable that I would never see him again.

I was still sitting there, pondering all the names and their connections to each other, when Peter arrived home just before sundown, the tip of his surfboard poking out the passenger window of his old VW bug. He climbed out the driver’s side, barefoot and sandy, clad in wet swimming trunks that clung to him like sandwich wrap. Before going upstairs to shower, he stood in the middle of the lawn, revolving slowly, while I washed him off with the garden hose, entranced by the play of cascading water and gentle light on his body, and wanting him more fiercely than ever, even as another part of me resisted him.

Before he mounted the steps, I invited him down to dinner and a viewing of Cecile Chang’s video. By the time he was back, showered but still deliciously damp in fresh shorts and sandals but no shirt, I’d fired up the grill on the patio, taken a quick shower myself, and opened up the windows all around the house to let in some air. Peter settled on the bed in the little bedroom, propped up on big pillows, while I slipped the cassette into the machine and hit the play button. I tossed him the remote control, and settled in beside him with one arm slung across his bare shoulders.

The video was essentially the same one that Chang had shown me in her office, but with all the titles and graphics inserted, along with the music, and some audio and visual rough spots smoothed out. By now, I could spot the more rudimentary video effects, such as fades and dissolves, but I asked Peter to point out any he might recognize that wouldn’t be familiar to a neophyte like myself. He stopped the tape several times to identify various techniques—crosscutting, flop-over, skip frame, wipe—and I marveled aloud that someone so young could know so much.

“I grew up playing Nintendo and composing on a Mac,” he said. “I was creating my own movies on the computer before I was out of high school. Nothing I’d want to show anybody now. But I learned how to manipulate images the way I wanted, which is what video editing is all about.”

“Not in the documentary field, though.”

“Sure, documentaries too.”

“Isn’t each shot in a documentary supposed to be the literal truth, exactly as the camera recorded it?”

“Once, maybe. Not anymore.”

“Educate me, Peter.”

He rewound the tape again.

“Today, you can use pictures to make people think they’re seeing something they’re not. Woody Allen did it back in 1983 in that movie
Zelig
, where he inserted himself into famous historical scenes. So did the people who made
Forrest Gump
, sticking Tom Hanks into old documentary footage to make it look like he was really there when it was shot. Documentary filmmakers do the same stuff all the time, at least some of them. They just don’t want you to know it.”

“How?”

“Cheat shots. Like right here.”

He stopped the tape, and started it forward again.

“You see how Cecile’s standing in the research room at the end of the evening, wrapping up the show? I can tell they created a key effect here.”

“A key effect.”

“You create key effects with the AVID system in what they call the Media Composer. A key effect separates the foreground from the background, with different effect parameters, depending on whether you create a chroma key, luma key, or matte key.”

“You’re losing me, Peter.”

“It’s kind of complicated.”

“Start at the beginning. What’s a key effect?”

“A special effect that separates the foreground elements in a video clip from the background. That’s the basic function.”

“Why would you want to do that in a documentary?”

“All kinds of reasons, when you want to integrate two images that in reality are separate. You see it every night on TV, when the weather guy’s in front of a weather map. He’s not really in front of a weather map, he’s in front of a blue screen. By using a chroma key that eliminates the color blue, the video engineer is able to project the weather map on that blue screen, as if it’s behind the weather reporter, when it’s really not. They can do all kinds of stuff now that’s a lot more technically sophisticated than that.”

“How do you know Cecile created a key effect here?”

He rewound the tape once more and started replaying it as Chang walked into the research room at the end of the night, to wrap up the shooting.

“Earlier in the show, when she was in the research room—the footage they shot in the morning—there was a natural shadow behind her, created by the camera lights. In this section, which was shot in the same room but at night, when everyone was gone, there’s no shadow. That tells me they keyed the image of Cecile against the background.”

“They took footage of Cecile’s image in the morning, and inserted it digitally against background footage shot at night, when the clock showed the later time, and the evening CNN telecast was on.”

“Exactly.”

“Interesting.”

“Normally, they’d insert the shadow to make it look seamless and natural. They were probably in a hurry, and someone missed it.”

“There’s even an effect for inserting someone’s shadow?”

“Oh, yeah. The technology’s amazing now. They can make you believe you’re seeing almost anything they want.”

The tape faded to black, and Peter hit rewind again. We lay together, listening to the whir of the machine. I stroked his face with the back of my fingers, and let my hand drift to his chest, playing with the silky hairs. He turned his head, and we kissed. A moment later, we were in each other’s arms, and my mouth was moving from his lips down to his chest and belly. Then, as quickly as we started, I stopped.

“The coals are probably ready. We should get the dinner going.”

He cupped his hand over the bulge in my pants.

“You sure that’s what you want to do?”

I laughed.

“No.” I kissed him quickly on the lips. “But I think we should.”

The big porterhouse, enough for both of us, sizzled as I tossed it on the grill, and Peter placed small rosebud potatoes around it, buttered and wrapped in foil. In the kitchen, we whipped up a salad together, kissing and fondling each other between the romaine and the cabbage, between the broccoli and the bean sprouts, between the tomatoes and the dressing, at which point the notion of undressing strongly insinuated itself into the recipe. Yet each time my hand strayed to the waistband of his shorts, something stopped me from going farther. Then I was outside, turning the charred steak and the potatoes one last time, while Peter brought out the plates and silver.

We ate on the patio with some vintage Sarah Vaughan tunes playing in the background, while feeding scraps to Maggie and the cats. When “Lover Man” ended, along with my old tape, we sat in silence for a while. Finally, I asked Peter if he had something on his mind. He said he thought it was funny that we hadn’t talked about what had happened the previous night.

“You like Oree a lot, I can tell.” When I said nothing to that, he added, “So why are you with me, if you feel that way about him?”

“That’s a complicated question, Peter.”

“That’s just a way of not answering me, Ben.”

I smiled a little.
Well, good for you, Peter.

“I suppose I’m with you because Oree likes to take his time in matters of love. Which is probably what most smart people do. The way you and Cheryl are doing.”

The silence intruded again as he finished the last of his steak. When he spoke again, he was staring off distantly across the yard.

“I called her today,” he said softly. “I call her almost every day.”

“I know.”

His focus pulled back, and he turned it on me.

“How do you know?”

“Because I know you, Peter. And I know how you are with me.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m an adventure for you. A learning experience, a male bonding experiment. But you’re not a homosexual man, not at your core.”

“Can’t a man be more than one thing?”

“Of course. But the fact is, most of the time we’re together, with our clothes off, you’re as limp as a licorice stick. The only time you get hard is when you close your eyes, when I’m doing what Cheryl does.”

“I really like what we do together, Ben. It feels good.”

“Of course it does. How can touching the way we do not feel good, unless the mind is set rigidly against it? In truth, though, it takes a woman to turn you on. Am I wrong?”

He grinned and dropped his eyes.

“I guess not.”

“Hey.” He looked over again. “That’s nothing to be ashamed of, having stronger feelings for Cheryl than for me.”

“I want to be a whole person, Ben. I want to relate to everyone equally. I don’t want to have any barriers holding me back from people.”

“You’re about the most whole person I ever met in my life, Peter. Stop trying so hard. You’re there. You just don’t know it.”

“So you don’t want to sleep with me again?”

“I’ll never stop wanting to sleep with you, Peter.” I reached across, and our hands joined, fingers entwined. “I’m just not sure it’s the right thing for either of us.”

I saw his beautiful chest heave as he sighed.

“I do miss Cheryl. Even when I’m with you, sometimes. I admit it, I think about her. Even when you do things to me that, well, that I like, and she doesn’t do.” He shook his head. “Wow.”

“What?”

“Back in Minnesota, I never thought I’d be talking to a guy like this. That I’d be doing the stuff I’ve been doing.”